Rad 93, part one of three
Rad 93, part two of three
Rad 93, part three of three

This will likely be the last time I make specific note of a Superguy or Sfstory posting in this, my personal LiveJournal. Since I also post the notices to the superguy_list community, there's no real sense in doing it twice. So if you care to get such notices in the future via your LJ friends list, that's where to go.

I'll also be scaling back my Superguy efforts some in the coming year -- though only some, as I'm having much fun with it, and it's done wonders for banishing the creative funk I was in. But I need as to balance this fun stuff with... well, other fun stuff for which I hope to someday get paid. I've got short stories to whip into shape, a couple ideas for my next effort at a novel, a synopsis to write for an old novel I spent some of this year hammering into publishable shape (this is not to be confused with The Novel, which continues to languish on a slush pile somewhere), some collaborative notions I'm toying with... and who knows, maybe I'll even get a webcomic going. And maybe my spleen will start making squeaking noises. Anything is possible in the new year.

In the meantime, please enjoy the episode, and have a happy and rococo New Year.

--

I just learned this morning, from lemagia, that Terry Pratchett has been diagnosed with an early-onset form of Alzheimers. Which is not good news for anyone, though Terry's announcement handles it with optimism and warm wit.

I don't think I'm going to get into, just now, how much his books have affected me, or how I have in recent years read his books to see how it is he got so damn good at what he does. Like he says, he's 'not dead yet,' so no eulogies, please. (And the last line in the announcement is priceless, and pure Terry.) And well wishes shouldn't have anything to do with how many books he wrote (a lot), or how good they were (very very and very some more).

I met him at a science fiction convention held in Detroit a few years back (the first Penguicon, actually), and found him as kind, warm, witty and charming as anyone who's read his books could hope. So I'll just wish him my best in this, and hope that the end is still a long ways away.

Having knocked the rust off my Superguy writing with last month's Rad episode, I thought I'd turn to my even-longer corroding Sfstory series, Universal Solvents, to see if I could kick it back in gear. Lo, here are the results:

Universal Solvents #19, part one of two
Universal Solvents #19, part two of two

For more info on what Sfstory is, and how it relates to Superguy, check out the succinct but essentially accurate Wikipedia entry on Sfstory, and of course the always-useful Sfstory Archives.

(x-posted to superguy_list)

--

After 14 months, I finally get around to posting the next episode! Hurrah!

Rad #92, part one of two
Rad #92, part two of two

(Looking for the previous installment? Check here.)

Man, that was a long wait for what is, essentially, a lot of exposition and dialogue. I gotta put some ninjas into the next one.

--

I've finished html-ifying the Sfstory archives, for those who care about such matters. What's more, I've moved them to their very own subdomain on my Novitious.com website:

sfstory.novitious.com

And yes, I will finish the Universal Solvents series. Sometime before the end of the decade. Possibly.

--

Meme pinched like a nickle bag of funk from flemco:

"When you see this, post a little weensy excerpt from as many random works-in-progress as you can find lying around. Who knows? Maybe inspiration will burst forth and do something, um, inspiration-y."

( Excerptation behind the cut! )

--

The FFTFNAMIOA campaign has, at long last, reached its glorious conclusion. I completed the final draft of Brutal Light about three weeks ago, finished the dreaded and shadowy Putting It Into Standard Manuscript Format ceremony two weeks ago, and spent much of the last week doing the synopsis and cover letter and other arcana that publishers claim they like.

Today, I took my submissions package (consisting of the cover letter, prologue and first three chapters, synopsis, and stamped reply envelope) and I MAILED THE HELL OUT OF THAT THING!

(Actually, I just handed it to the guy at the post office. But on the inside, I mailed the hell out of it.)

So, off it goes, to darken slush piles for years to come. And I can actually write something else now. It makes me tingle in dreaded and shadowy places.

Thanks to everyone who offered to critique, said vaguely encouraging things, or at least put up with my incoherent rambles about the progress of the novel whenever asked about how it was going, or how I was doing, or if I like toast. (I do, by the way.) It helped me through the rough patches.

That's all. Enjoy the bacon bits.

--

I've been editing up a storm in my campaign to Finally Finish The Fucking Novel And Mail It Out Already, which is the principal reason I've not been making posts to LJ of late. (Well, that and a very nasty stomach bug that had me laid up most of last weekend and then jumped over to my wife, who is just now recovering.) This period of me not posting to LJ (and not doing very much commenting on friends posts, though I do continue to read them) will likely continue until the glorious FFTFNAMIOA campaign has reached its conclusion (which also means that every other writing project I've got in mind, not to mention Rad #92, is On Hold until then).

So... there. I guess.

In fact, the only reason you're getting a post now is because some of you still may have not seen the movie Pan's Labyrinth, and some of that subset of you may still have it showing at some reasonably local theater ("reasonably" as in "somewhere in the state in which you live"). If you are a part of this select group... why the hell are you still reading this? Why are you not out driving, biking, running, or crawling in the direction of that theater like crazed sinners who have suddenly seen the horrifying errors of your non-seeing-Pan's-Labyrinth ways? WHYYYYYYYYY???

Seriously. You should.

In the meantime, I have a grindstone to get fresh with.

Back in less stressed times, I made note of my finishing of the second draft of Brutal Light, aka "The Beast 2.0," aka "The Novel," aka "the bane of my existence." I quite optimistically suggested I'd start the third and final draft in mid-September, with an eye toward chucking it at an unsuspecting publisher's slush pile in mid-February.

Foolish Gary. Silly Gary. Life applied the smack-down to my person, and suddenly it is early January 2007. WTF, I say. WTF.

But I am still here. My fingers, as it turns out, still work.

The third and final draft is begun. "The Beast 3.0" lives. I will take no further breaks until I have handed it over in a nicely sealed package to the gentle mercies of the U.S. Postal Service. And if I miss my self-imposed deadline of the end of June 2007, you all have my permission to come over to my house and kick me in a location where I should not like to be kicked. Which is pretty much anywhere, so you choose.

For those of you who are beta-readers, I will keep the online pages with the second draft up and available. If you have lost your instructions on how to find them, e-mail me or comment below, and I'll re-send them.

-

Rad #91 (part one of two)
Rad #91 (part two of two)

I wrote for Superguy, a shared-universe humorous superhero fiction group, in the late eighties to mid-nineties. (Actually, I never really "stopped" writing for Superguy, but my output dropped way off when I turned my attention to the first of several attempts to bang out a novel.) It would take me a while to fully talk about how much that time meant to me, and how it and the people I came to know as friends through it set me on the path I'm on now. Suffice it to say that, even now, I sometimes feel a great deal of nostalgia for those days.

"Rad" was the first series I ever wrote for Superguy, in the prehistoric years from 1989 to 1991. It went for ninety episodes, until I graduated from college and had to go forth and seek my fortune. When I wrote them, I was more concerned with just telling a funny story than with strange, esoteric things such as "syntax," or "spelling," or "quality." And though some of the things I wrote now make me... well, not cringe, exactly, but maybe just shake my head in exasperation.

The recently released Superman Returns was the catalyst for this return to yesteryear. I've long had a sort of vague intent to start a new series someday, updating on the current whereabouts of my old characters. Because even though I haven't written about them in ages, they've grown older. They see the world in ways they didn't when I was a barely-adult writer with a number of juvenile impulses to work through. Seeing the movie made me think of them, though Rad is not really like Superman, and the story I started is not going to be a parody or whatever on the movie.

I can't say that those of you not familiar with Superguy will get all, or even most, of the references, but hopefully you won't be completely lost, either. I expect that future episodes (which I'm going to try to do once every other month, but don't hold me to it) will be a little less heavy on the exposition.

Brutal Light, which I've previously referred to as "The Novel" or "The Beast" or "Aaaaaagh! It's in my head and it won't leave except through my fingers! Aaaagh!," is now complete through the second draft stage. It took me about six-and-a-half months to get through it, which was about three-and-a-half more than I originally thought I would need, but considerably less than the three years the first draft sucked up. It now stands at about 108,000 words (up from 87,000 in the first draft), which I expect will get trimmed back some in the third-and-final draft.

What this means is that I've finally (finally!) reached the point where I won't entirely cringe at the thought that someone else might read this. (And no, that's not false modesty. That's me being far too close to this for far too long and acknowledging I have no idea how this is going to be received.) There's still some geographical details to tweak, but it's basically ready for critique. When I've got something of a password-protected web-based thing set up for it, I'll start waving my tin cup around and begging for beta readers.

I'm hoping to get started on the final draft sometime in mid-September, with an eye toward tossing this onto a publisher's slush file by end-of-February 2007. And after that... well, we'll see. I may just flee into the wilderness and live off tree bark. I understand it is quite low in carbs.

(Despite popular demand, we bring you the confounding sequel to last fall's Vex, Further Vexed!)

At roughly two in the morning, Delmar Vex, the scientist known throughout every place in the world that makes regular use of 'discombobulate' as a noun, came to the astonishing and really quite overdue realization that he would never become the next 'American Idol.' Or the next 'Norwegian Idol.' Even the people at 'Trinidad y Tobagoan Idol' refused to return his calls. As a result, he embarked upon a time of soul-searching and identity-questing that, forty-five minutes later, resulted in him growing hair in unsightly and unlikely places for reasons not publishable in 'Reader's Digest.'

"I have been hexed!" Vex declared, for no other reason than he had to justify the title of the story somehow. Hexed he had been, and hairy he now was, so he stalked the back alleys of the city, and when the back alleys eluded him (Vex not being a very competent stalker), he stalked into the nearest White Castle and passed out.

Vex awoke within the dream, and, using techniques widely known amongst lucid dreamers, conjured up Kate Beckinsale, a hot tub filled with lime jello, and a surly parrot with mange. Ms. Beckinsale immediately sized up the situation, conjured her fist into Vex's chin, and then sped off in the disconcertingly mobile hot tub to a celebrity party in the La Brea Tar Pits.

"Ha, ha," said the surly parrot.

"Oh, surly parrot!" Vex wailed. "I have been hexed! Tell me who has done this heinous act, and how I might wreak my unstoppable and if-possible-tax-deductible vengeance and blame it on teenagers wearing big pants!"

"You hexed yourself, asshat!" the parrot replied, its voice eerily like that of Basil Rathbone. "Wake up and smell the cheese fries! Caw, I say, caw!"

Vex woke up, and saw, seated opposite himself in the White Castle, a hideous tentacled monster that was slobbering all over his booth table and had eaten all of his sliders.

He screamed, then woke up again, and saw, seated opposite himself in the White Castle, Tom Bosley, who was explaining how he could become stunningly and erotically rich by selling a bunch of crap that some mail-order guys have in a warehouse in Ass End, New Mexico.

Vex tried the whole scream and wake up thing again, on the theory that if he tried it enough times, Kate Beckinsale would turn up again, but it did not work. Tom Bosley was still seated across from him. The crumbs from Vex's sliders coated his mangy, sweat-pitted shirt.

"Next time, don't sit on the TiVo remote," said Bosley, who was doing his best to distract Vex from staring at his tentacles. "Especially the button marked 'Hex.' Anyone who does that is not part of the solution!"

Vex sneered, stood, swayed, and shimmied. "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the discombobulate!" he retorted. Bosley, unable to assail that kind of logic, was forced to say "Caw!" He then used his tentacles to extract three organs from places in Vex not publishable in 'Golf Digest' and juggle them, but nobody forced him to do that.

There's a lesson in this for all of us.

So. Spring has sprung. In case you were wondering what that rusty coiled metal thing was doing lodged in your right nostril. No point suing - you have a calendar to warn you about these things.

Back on the ranch, I'm more-or-less managing to get back into making progress on the second draft of the novel. Some bits are getting trimmed, other bits are getting added. More added then subtracted, so far. The date I gave before about shoveling this out to a publisher by Memorial Day? That's in the ground, making the flowers grow real purty. Next best guess is that by Memorial Day, I should at least be ready to start floating the first half or three-quarters out and about to beta readers. (And hopefully by then, I'll have figured out how the hell I want to do that -- the old school way of emailing a file, or the new school way of putting it up on a password protected web site. Probably wouldn't hurt to actually ask about who wants to be a beta reader, but I'm holding off on that 'till the day gets, you know, closer. So people don't volunteer, then forget, then feel guilty because they have lives and they're too busy just at the point when I come a'callin.)

Meanwhile, I'm also helping my wife set up her photography business, particularly the web-based portion of it. And I've got about five metric fuckloads of leaves to clear out of the backyard because I was too busy last fall to deal with it. Oh, yeah, and I have to do my taxes. And for some inscrutable, probably blamable-on-the-conspiracy-or-elves-or-Mitchell reason, I'm thinking of starting up a webcomic (though not until I've finished shoveling the novel at a publisher - because, you know, I like having my skull not explode), and I keep coming up with stuff for it instead of doing all the other stuff demanding my attention.

And somewhere in all of that, find some time to sleep. For a month.

(This is, in some terribly vague and unimportant sense, a sequel to Vex, Vexed, from last year.)

His nostrils redolent with the pungent scent of blood and toner ink, Delmar Vex returned to his office, determined to write up the results of his latest experiment in such a way that it would bring fame and fortune, or at least famous and fortunate women, hurtling like inexplicably gaseous daschunds in his general direction. Toward that end, he was trying to figure out how to avoid mentioning the giant sloth and its angry comments about the sudden disappearance of its 'Sex and the City' DVD collection, and thus distracted, he entirely failed to notice that he was not in his office in New York but was, in fact, in a rundown bar in Lumbar, Wisconsin.

"Janice!" he bellowed. "Take a letter!"

There were three other entities in the bar. One was a dog. One was a massive transcendent entity completely imperceptible to humans, only present because it felt like slumming. One was a bartender. None was named Janice, and none moved to take any letters from Vex. Vex was vexed.

"A letter!" Vex bellowed again. "Must be taken! The scientific world must be made to know... things! Things that it was not meant to know!"

"Like what?" the bartender-not-named-Janice asked, as he took down the shotgun from where it was mounted on the wall (just above the eerie and disturbing freeze-dried body of Spuds MacKenzie).

"I cannot speak of them!" Vex replied. His emotions were bouncing around in his head with the fury of pit bulls, the speed of cheetahs, the grace of dugongs, and the prurient interest of Baptists. He was in a state, he realized, where he might do something terrible, such as consume a 'light' beer.

"If you can't speak of them," the dog-also-not-and-we-can't-stress-this-enough-not-named-Janice asked, "why do you want to dictate a letter?"

This, as was the case with so many questions posed to him by beings without any discernible jaw structure that would allow the English language to be spoken, was a question Vex could not answer. To cover his hideously shaming lack of knowledge, he blustered a bit more. When it was clear that blustering had no effect, he tried fancying a bit.

"Go away," the bartender told Vex, punctuating his words with a blast from his shotgun. Vex, who had never seen a shotgun blast used to make a comma, applauded as he ran out of the bar.

In the end, Vex got what he wanted. Well, actually, he got run over by Jessica Alba on a motorcycle, but it was close enough for him.

I've written the words "the end" before, but I can't recall the last time it felt so good.

The first draft of the novel is done. Roughly eighty-seven thousand words. Some of it, the first half in particular, has seen considerable editing and revision, and it and the rest will see a good amount more. It'll probably be early 2006 before I'm even ready to fling it at any beta readers to get reactions, critiques, and all that stuff that will in turn feed into the final draft.

But I've written the end. The story is told, if only to me.

And it feels... damn... good.

Well, so long as I'm here, retroactively adding tags to the few sparse things I've put in this LJ...

As some of you know... well, as probably every one of you know, because I tend to ramble on about this sort of thing a lot, to make up for not actually doing it so much these days... I'm hacking away at a novel. It's the fifth variation on something I've been trying to finish since, oh, 1996. And I'm about two chapters and an epilogue away from finishing the first draft. (Well, some of it is still first draft. Other parts are well into the second or third or even fourth draft. But anyway.)

The closer I get to the end, the slower it goes. I'm wondering if this is some kind of literary law, or if it's just me. I estimate that by the time I get to the last line in the epilogue, I'll be typing at a velocity of roughly one letter per fortnight.

But I'm gonna get the fucker done. Because this time, this time, my hearties, this is the goods. This is the one that will see the light of day, even if every publisher in the universe rejects it and I have to self-publish it at gunpoint (something that is awkward all the way around, if you've ever been in that situation).

That's all for now.

Tags are fun.

For robotech_master, yes indeed.

( Worse Than Torture )

For demiurgent, don’tcha know.

A brief explanation for those who don’t already know: Manny and Chalandra are two characters from my Superguy writing days. Manny was a sidekick for quite a while before getting the superpower of being exceptionally confusing. (If he was in a movie, he could be played by Ben Stiller.) Chalandra was, and is, a 500-year old vampire who appears to be a quite lovely twenty-two year old woman. (If she was in a movie, she could be played by… oh, I don’t know… Jessica Alba, maybe? And even if not, get Jessica Alba anyway. Because I mean… dude. Jessica Alba.) Both were on the same super-team for quite a long time before a series of events too convoluted to explain here caused them to leave. They subsequently got married and not written about much after that.

( One Hazard of Marrying a Vampire )

For mrbankies, with apologies to J.K. Rowling, Douglas Adams, Arthur C. Clarke, and anyone else who deserves, needs, or wants one.

( A Sufficiently Advanced Beverage )

For masonk, we "proudly" present...

( The Shadow Over Freedonia )